Firefox’s new logo has more fire, less fox

They warned us that it was coming, and now it’s here: Mozilla took the wraps off its new logo for the storied Firefox web browser today.

But before you say “What did they do to that poor fox!” know that the logo you see above actually isn’t it — that’s the overarching logo for Mozilla’s whole family of Firefox products, with each component (including the browser) having its own logo, too. Here:

See? Fox is alive and well… if a little ethereal. The logo also looks a little like a world on fire, which many of us can easily identify with these days. I think it’ll grow on me.

I whipped up this little comparison image so you can see how the browser logo has evolved over the years:

Last July, Mozilla designers told the world the logo would need to evolve to encompass a larger family of products, saying that “as an icon, that fast fox with a flaming tail doesn’t offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family” — and revealing that they could either go more foxy or more swooshy. Did they make the right choice?